Whenever you visit a WRAP protected website, your browser automatically sends the cookie to that webserver, where it verifies that the cookie is genuine and recognizes you by that userid.
Wouldn't that be a third-party cookie though? I throw all those out. (I'll RTFM now... looks interesting)
And I think that "a few decades" is optimistic if a "few" is 20, but pessimistic if a "few" is more than 50.
Also, if your conspiracy theories held true, shouldn't big business have enough foresight (pun) to nip nanotech in the bud? If so, why did they "allow" Clinton to budget half a BILLION for nanotech research?
You want constructive criticism? Hmm, OK: Anything they try to do to enforce the artificial scarcity of the infinitely reproducable will be an excercise in futility. So, it doesn't really matter what media companies do or don't do. The naked market will decide what happens from here, not the mass-media giants.
A few points:
Copyright is dead.
Copyright is dead.
Copyright is dead.
The good author will still get the attribution for his work that he so craves, but "securing for limited times" the right to profit from each individual instance of his "intellectual property" can never be enforced again; it's not as easy as 1-2-deadtree with the 'net. And a century-plus stranglehold on copyright doesn't help matters either. It does far more to DEMOTE "the progress of science and the useful arts," than does unfettered access to the cumulative knowledge/culture of mankind.
So, now that we know that it's impossible to squeeze a buck out of every schmuck, what does that leave us with? Something along the lines of "micro-Charity."
Someone should start a new sourceforge project. Call it: MyOpenBottomLine. If you enjoy someone's "stuff" and see that their verified OpenBottomLine is in the red, you might be more apt to help a starving artist out.:-) And maybe if you see that GiantMovieStudio-A has proposed a movie that you want to see made, but see that its going to cost 43 million to make, you could put 8 bucks towards their bottomline as benefactor... and hope that there's enough common denominators out there like you to get it made. </half-joking>
Passport may "suck," but for MOST people, the convenience of a single sign-on will far outweigh the downside of allowing MS centralized control of such a system (in the beginning at least).
What other viable, non-vapor authentication alternatives are there that would offer the same seemless convenience, and that don't need "monopoly leverage" to reach critical mass? Not many-XNS might have a slim chance.
A gun's safety switch != "for-da-childwren-gunlock".
The analagy I was making is that a car could have a similar safety mechanism, for the protection of you and others around you, but that you could easily turn the safety off in order to drive offroad or whatever.
A gun lock analagy, on the other hand, goes too far to the extreme, and allows for the required key to be taken away and/or escrowed.
It's hard to be successful and greedy when what you're selling doesn't cost anything to reproduce.
Indeed, and that's just the ethereal side of the equation!
If you think the old guard is squirming now, just imagine how these business' will react when molecular manufacturing (nanotech) is realized -- in a few more decades -- and then inevitably democratized.
What's scarce then? Dirt, sunlight, and design intelligence (oops, we'll have our AI assist in most of that labor too).
The economics of abundance is a "law" that "we" simply havn't adjusted to yet.
Sorry, but by the time these fantabulous flying eyesore's hit the mainstream (if ever), they're NOT going to be manually operated without a lot of computer assistance.
For example, the Solotrek simply won't LET YOU crash the thing, even if you're some suicidal drunken midget; though you could probably still kill yourself by flying into powerlines and other hazards that can't easily be identified by computer vision, or by GPS coords.
The same goes for cars in a few years -- the weakest link is always the driver, and it only makes sense to (slowly) take the idiot out of the equation. That doesn't mean you'll be giving the cops the power to disable your car, or your insurance company the power to stop you from doing donuts on the beach, or your nanny-state from enforcing seatbelt laws, etc. -- it's more like the safety switch on a gun, and if you decide to take the safety off, that's your choice, but if you fuck up, you're liable to a greater extent.
I began to loathe the Sci-Fi channel after they ramped up showing that "Crossing Over with Jonathan Edwards" psychic crap. I still watch a few shows, but lost any "respect" I had for the channel.
Take a look at the audience of that show sometime.....it's full of llamas as far as the eye can see; deer caught in headlights; highschool dropouts...depressing.
Was the sci-fi channel that desperate to cash in? (you've got phone sex in 1st place, and then you've got psychic lines in 2nd place (but with higher avg hold-times.))
$35/yr is a ripoff no matter which way you look at it. NSI simply doesn't provide enough bang for their buck anymore -- all they have going for them is the advantage of a headstart, and they just expect people to keep paying their price out of convenience and because they are the biggest corp and somehow more "respectable" and "trustworthy."
I own a few dozen domains, and as they've come up for renewal I've simply been transferring them to a certain French registrar that's cheaper ($10), better, and has much better terms.
More to the point though, I have never had any problems with NSI refusing to transfer my domains to gandi.net. I can't say much for other registrars however.
It seems that many of the "best" heart-wrenching stories have a few threads in common: innocence lost, ultimate sacrifice, and sympathy for others (sympathy being our primal base emotion behind all our morals).
btw why don't they lower the price if you've seen the ad 1 gazillion times and keep ignoring it?
Because if you're ignoring the ad anyway, you're probably not going to notice the "20...25...30...35...40...60% Off!" either. Besides, it's more opportunistic to try and pitch some OTHER overpriced thing at you instead of offering a lower price on the old thing that you weren't interested in to begin with. And lastly, fatwallet.com (and other) discount sites would have a field day...
Better to just block the ads and go to price comparison sites to get the deals.
I'm willing to accept annoying popups if it means that sites won't go out of business.
You should listen to yourself.
It's like the shortsighted people who, to this day, say, "Make sure to click on your favorite websites' banners to help them out!" when in reality all you're doing is diluting the value of an eyeball/click-through, which doesn't help anyone in the "food-chain."
So, in other words, what you're saying is, "I'm willing to accept being increasingly annoyed by popups [and other advertising], if it means that my favorite sites' get paid imaginary-money for it! Nevermind that the annoyance factor results in my resentment of the product or service being mentally engineered upon my consumer-brain."
Since I seek out what I want to buy, and I make it point to avoid "evil" advertiser influence, it's my point of view that by opting-out, I'm actually SAVING the advertiser from wasting money, and SAVING myself aggrevation.
I don't need a sheepherder to tell me what to buy (*cough*or what God to believe in*cough*), so I'll continue to let the sheeple subsidize my 'net with their influenced purchases. There's WAY more than enough sheep to go around; I'm not worried.
We humans only like to pretend that we're civilized; especially those of us can easily AFFORD that facade.
Seeming just below the surface of this phony civility is our primitive monkey-mind, and when we can't go to war to weed out the weak, we instead play wargames in the form of sports. When we can't rape our women like we did for thousands of years, we close our eyes when we fuck our wives. If we can't stare our raw mortality in the face with Roman-esque colosseum games, we'll get a dose from RealTV or rotten.com instead.
The savage in us IS human!
(Also, since our technology has been evolving faster than us since the invention of FIRE, we'll either destroy ourselves with BIGGER FIRE, or, one day we will use our tech to disarm our useless primative urges and guide our own evolution down a better path)
You assume that customers who are being lied to will somehow figure it out...
Well, hopefully, one day some pissed-off programmer will create the ultimate in distributed bullshit detector networks, where the cream of unbiased truth, wisdom, and great deals(!), rises to the top, thanks to the dynamic input of people all over the world who have earned collective trust as clued-in in each subject area. All of the bullshit that business once had no problem pulling over peoples' eyes, gets red-flagged (in a seamless GUI kind of way), and it sinks to the bottom of the heap.
Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about...
"Buy a Widget at our rock bottom sale price of only $39.95!!!" **** BULLSHIT DETECTED--"User `TheDealHunter69' notes you can buy this same Widget for $9.50 at the WidgetWharehouse.com, and it also turns out that their resellerratings.com is HIGHER than WidgetRipoffs.com."
"CNN reports on a new diet drug that actually works!" **** BULLSHIT DETECTED--"Dieting drugs are a scam; there is no magic pill. Want to lose weight? Stop eating like a pig, and get off your fat ass more often. i.e. burn more energy than you eat."
"Altavista Search: 'best credit card offer'--Result 1 of 10: "Get low, low rates at lowlowlowrates.com!" **** BULLSHIT DETECTED--"User 'AVWatchDog100' points out that lowlowlowrates.com's rates are never the lowest; that their service IS the lowest; that they sell your information to anyone with a buck; that they pay Altavista for top10 placement; and they are also a known email SPAMMER. AVOID!"
A (mostly objective) system like this would be no easy achievment...notwithstanding the problem seamless integration with the OS and browser. And the only way to get everyone using and benefiting from it would be by word-of-mouth, since the systems' sole purpose is rocking the boat in favor of the truth--something that hits most businesses in the pocketbook, so they'd do everything they could to kill it (which includes refusing to run your ads on their networks--like they already do for other 'subversive' campaigns.)
If you have 3 pepsis, and you drink 1 pepsi, how many cool refreshing pepsis do you have left?
As many as I want?;-)
Picard: "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot...and a Pepsi."
...
PepsiCo, Inc.: "Thief! Tea may be Open Source, but that molecular pattern for sugar-water is our property! The International Artificial Scarcity Treaty of 2035 makes unauthorized nano-replication illegal!"
...
Picard: "Make that an OpenCola then computer."
... OpenCola Inc.: "Yay for our side! Yay for free beer! Damn The Man(tm)!"
...
Picard: "....*gulp*....*wretch*....this tastes like shit!"
...in The Information Age and the Printing Press that goes, "Owning Knowledge: From Attribution to Copyrights to ???", which was meant to illustrate the evolution of information "ownership" from non-existant before the printing press, to a (once-upon-a-time-)limited 'legal fiction' for publishers after gutenberg, to todays networks where zero-cost dissemination of knowledge obsoletes the old notion of copyright, leaving and unknown to follow it.
If UK schools are actually trying to push establishment IP propaganda onto the rebellious young, that's yet another sign that the traditional concept of copyright is D-E-A-D; they know they will never be able to effectively enforce copyrights, so their last resort is to engineer the memepool. Kind of sad to think about it.
I don't know what's next, but I do know that if an "intellectual property" perversion in an "information economy" is ever taken seriously, it will only be a temporary concession. Once the other, physical side of the economics-of-abundance equation is balanced (in a few decades), people can then stop being such selfish little primates because they won't have to worry about putting food on the table. You can just produce your art, get your ego rubbed, and live a good life. (/end happy-happy-joy-joy)
There's one innovation that I'm still waiting for: The Hum-A-Song Search Engine!
Remember that episode of 'Married with Children' where Al couldn't remember the name of a record of a tune he had stuck in his head? He kept asking everyone if they knew where `"go with him..."' was from, but no one knew.
Wasn't MIT working on something like this? Some kind of fuzzy waveform pattern recognition?
(There's still the same old problem of needing legal access to ALL recorded songs known to man, in order to have a complete search domain.)
Re:That's still retarded.
on
BYO Battlebot
·
· Score: 1
Special case "AI" sucks though.
Instead, maybe what someone needs to do is, create a new bot named Eurisko^2; give it a baby neural net and a basic genetic algorithm to follow; add-on the requisite computer vision and extra-sensory feedback; feed it its capabilities and the battlebot ruleset, and then...set the thing loose in a parking lot full of angry kiddies wielding spiked baseball bats, hammers, flails, power-saws, fireplace pokers, and wedge-shaped shovels (oh my!). Let it evolve in training, tuning its neural pathways with do's and dont's, like any good pavlov dog would.
Of course, anything learning in meatspace is slow, so you'd actually want to simulate those trillions of battlebot matches on that 'beowulf cluster of toasters' in the basement; breeding the best bot with the best strategy to fare against the most varied set of other possible enemy bots.
(Yeah, I know none of this NN & GA stuff is that simple, because if it was, it would have been applied by now.:-)
That would work, except that once recorder #1 has been confiscated (and the cop fails to ask you if you have a recorder #2) he will rightly assume that your conversation is now private. Since you're the only one who knows that you're still making a "secret recording," you're back to square one--legally.
Government should only have two jobs: Assisting people in protecting themselves from 1) Force, and 2) Fraud.
I wouldn't consider a softdrink that [allegedly] causes 3 deaths in 10,000,000 (or whatever) defrauding the public. I would call the drink a success, and I would call the three people who may have died from rare over-consumption complications, unfortunate Darwin Award recipients (cruel and insensitive? maybe. realistic? yes).
People aren't dropping dead left and right, and still, someone might be compelled to check into it (Consumer Reports), but as long as it poses no more risk than the odds of a shark attack, then leave it the fuck alone.
The Safety Nazi's(tm) are sterilizing the fun in life by trying to remove all risk for ALL people. Fuck 'em.
I'm still waiting for the first use of a water canon as a weapon; the same type of high-pressure deal that the bomb squad uses to destroy suspect packages.
I suppose the water stream would still technically be a projectile though...and the producers probably wouldn't be too happy with Mike Tyson KO's.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't that be a third-party cookie though? I throw all those out. (I'll RTFM now... looks interesting)
Also, if your conspiracy theories held true, shouldn't big business have enough foresight (pun) to nip nanotech in the bud? If so, why did they "allow" Clinton to budget half a BILLION for nanotech research?
A few points:
- Copyright is dead.
- Copyright is dead.
- Copyright is dead.
The good author will still get the attribution for his work that he so craves, but "securing for limited times" the right to profit from each individual instance of his "intellectual property" can never be enforced again; it's not as easy as 1-2-deadtree with the 'net. And a century-plus stranglehold on copyright doesn't help matters either. It does far more to DEMOTE "the progress of science and the useful arts," than does unfettered access to the cumulative knowledge/culture of mankind.So, now that we know that it's impossible to squeeze a buck out of every schmuck, what does that leave us with? Something along the lines of "micro-Charity."
Someone should start a new sourceforge project. Call it: MyOpenBottomLine. If you enjoy someone's "stuff" and see that their verified OpenBottomLine is in the red, you might be more apt to help a starving artist out. :-) And maybe if you see that GiantMovieStudio-A has proposed a movie that you want to see made, but see that its going to cost 43 million to make, you could put 8 bucks towards their bottomline as benefactor... and hope that there's enough common denominators out there like you to get it made. </half-joking>
What other viable, non-vapor authentication alternatives are there that would offer the same seemless convenience, and that don't need "monopoly leverage" to reach critical mass? Not many-XNS might have a slim chance.
Gatekeepers and keymasters...
The analagy I was making is that a car could have a similar safety mechanism, for the protection of you and others around you, but that you could easily turn the safety off in order to drive offroad or whatever.
A gun lock analagy, on the other hand, goes too far to the extreme, and allows for the required key to be taken away and/or escrowed.
Indeed, and that's just the ethereal side of the equation!
If you think the old guard is squirming now, just imagine how these business' will react when molecular manufacturing (nanotech) is realized -- in a few more decades -- and then inevitably democratized.
What's scarce then? Dirt, sunlight, and design intelligence (oops, we'll have our AI assist in most of that labor too).
The economics of abundance is a "law" that "we" simply havn't adjusted to yet.
For example, the Solotrek simply won't LET YOU crash the thing, even if you're some suicidal drunken midget; though you could probably still kill yourself by flying into powerlines and other hazards that can't easily be identified by computer vision, or by GPS coords.
The same goes for cars in a few years -- the weakest link is always the driver, and it only makes sense to (slowly) take the idiot out of the equation. That doesn't mean you'll be giving the cops the power to disable your car, or your insurance company the power to stop you from doing donuts on the beach, or your nanny-state from enforcing seatbelt laws, etc. -- it's more like the safety switch on a gun, and if you decide to take the safety off, that's your choice, but if you fuck up, you're liable to a greater extent.
But you realize, by replying, you exacerbate the very thing you were bitching about to begin with--so don't do it again! >:)
Cowboy Bebop, Under-appreciating Americans, Censorship, yada yada...
Take a look at the audience of that show sometime.....it's full of llamas as far as the eye can see; deer caught in headlights; highschool dropouts...depressing.
Was the sci-fi channel that desperate to cash in? (you've got phone sex in 1st place, and then you've got psychic lines in 2nd place (but with higher avg hold-times.))
I own a few dozen domains, and as they've come up for renewal I've simply been transferring them to a certain French registrar that's cheaper ($10), better, and has much better terms.
More to the point though, I have never had any problems with NSI refusing to transfer my domains to gandi.net. I can't say much for other registrars however.
That vibration you're feeling is wasted energy that could have been focused more efficiently.
It seems that many of the "best" heart-wrenching stories have a few threads in common: innocence lost, ultimate sacrifice, and sympathy for others (sympathy being our primal base emotion behind all our morals).
Because people don't take as good of care of things they didn't pay for. :-)
Because if you're ignoring the ad anyway, you're probably not going to notice the "20...25...30...35...40...60% Off!" either. Besides, it's more opportunistic to try and pitch some OTHER overpriced thing at you instead of offering a lower price on the old thing that you weren't interested in to begin with. And lastly, fatwallet.com (and other) discount sites would have a field day...
Better to just block the ads and go to price comparison sites to get the deals.
You should listen to yourself.
It's like the shortsighted people who, to this day, say, "Make sure to click on your favorite websites' banners to help them out!" when in reality all you're doing is diluting the value of an eyeball/click-through, which doesn't help anyone in the "food-chain."
So, in other words, what you're saying is, "I'm willing to accept being increasingly annoyed by popups [and other advertising], if it means that my favorite sites' get paid imaginary-money for it! Nevermind that the annoyance factor results in my resentment of the product or service being mentally engineered upon my consumer-brain."
Since I seek out what I want to buy, and I make it point to avoid "evil" advertiser influence, it's my point of view that by opting-out, I'm actually SAVING the advertiser from wasting money, and SAVING myself aggrevation.
I don't need a sheepherder to tell me what to buy (*cough*or what God to believe in*cough*), so I'll continue to let the sheeple subsidize my 'net with their influenced purchases. There's WAY more than enough sheep to go around; I'm not worried.
Seeming just below the surface of this phony civility is our primitive monkey-mind, and when we can't go to war to weed out the weak, we instead play wargames in the form of sports. When we can't rape our women like we did for thousands of years, we close our eyes when we fuck our wives. If we can't stare our raw mortality in the face with Roman-esque colosseum games, we'll get a dose from RealTV or rotten.com instead.
The savage in us IS human!
(Also, since our technology has been evolving faster than us since the invention of FIRE, we'll either destroy ourselves with BIGGER FIRE, or, one day we will use our tech to disarm our useless primative urges and guide our own evolution down a better path)
Oh, anyone who wants to may take "my" unoriginal idea and implement it immediately....go head! ;-)
Well, hopefully, one day some pissed-off programmer will create the ultimate in distributed bullshit detector networks, where the cream of unbiased truth, wisdom, and great deals(!), rises to the top, thanks to the dynamic input of people all over the world who have earned collective trust as clued-in in each subject area. All of the bullshit that business once had no problem pulling over peoples' eyes, gets red-flagged (in a seamless GUI kind of way), and it sinks to the bottom of the heap.
- Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about...
- "Buy a Widget at our rock bottom sale price of only $39.95!!!" **** BULLSHIT DETECTED--"User `TheDealHunter69' notes you can buy this same Widget for $9.50 at the WidgetWharehouse.com, and it also turns out that their resellerratings.com is HIGHER than WidgetRipoffs.com."
- "CNN reports on a new diet drug that actually works!" **** BULLSHIT DETECTED--"Dieting drugs are a scam; there is no magic pill. Want to lose weight? Stop eating like a pig, and get off your fat ass more often. i.e. burn more energy than you eat."
- "Altavista Search: 'best credit card offer'--Result 1 of 10: "Get low, low rates at lowlowlowrates.com!" **** BULLSHIT DETECTED--"User 'AVWatchDog100' points out that lowlowlowrates.com's rates are never the lowest; that their service IS the lowest; that they sell your information to anyone with a buck; that they pay Altavista for top10 placement; and they are also a known email SPAMMER. AVOID!"
A (mostly objective) system like this would be no easy achievment...notwithstanding the problem seamless integration with the OS and browser. And the only way to get everyone using and benefiting from it would be by word-of-mouth, since the systems' sole purpose is rocking the boat in favor of the truth--something that hits most businesses in the pocketbook, so they'd do everything they could to kill it (which includes refusing to run your ads on their networks--like they already do for other 'subversive' campaigns.)As many as I want? ;-)
Picard: "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot...and a Pepsi."
...
PepsiCo, Inc.: "Thief! Tea may be Open Source, but that molecular pattern for sugar-water is our property! The International Artificial Scarcity Treaty of 2035 makes unauthorized nano-replication illegal!"
...
Picard: "Make that an OpenCola then computer."
...
OpenCola Inc.: "Yay for our side! Yay for free beer! Damn The Man(tm)!"
...
Picard: "....*gulp*....*wretch*....this tastes like shit!"
If UK schools are actually trying to push establishment IP propaganda onto the rebellious young, that's yet another sign that the traditional concept of copyright is D-E-A-D; they know they will never be able to effectively enforce copyrights, so their last resort is to engineer the memepool. Kind of sad to think about it.
I don't know what's next, but I do know that if an "intellectual property" perversion in an "information economy" is ever taken seriously, it will only be a temporary concession. Once the other, physical side of the economics-of-abundance equation is balanced (in a few decades), people can then stop being such selfish little primates because they won't have to worry about putting food on the table. You can just produce your art, get your ego rubbed, and live a good life. (/end happy-happy-joy-joy)
Remember that episode of 'Married with Children' where Al couldn't remember the name of a record of a tune he had stuck in his head? He kept asking everyone if they knew where `"go with him..."' was from, but no one knew.
Wasn't MIT working on something like this? Some kind of fuzzy waveform pattern recognition?
(There's still the same old problem of needing legal access to ALL recorded songs known to man, in order to have a complete search domain.)
Instead, maybe what someone needs to do is, create a new bot named Eurisko^2; give it a baby neural net and a basic genetic algorithm to follow; add-on the requisite computer vision and extra-sensory feedback; feed it its capabilities and the battlebot ruleset, and then...set the thing loose in a parking lot full of angry kiddies wielding spiked baseball bats, hammers, flails, power-saws, fireplace pokers, and wedge-shaped shovels (oh my!). Let it evolve in training, tuning its neural pathways with do's and dont's, like any good pavlov dog would.
Of course, anything learning in meatspace is slow, so you'd actually want to simulate those trillions of battlebot matches on that 'beowulf cluster of toasters' in the basement; breeding the best bot with the best strategy to fare against the most varied set of other possible enemy bots.
(Yeah, I know none of this NN & GA stuff is that simple, because if it was, it would have been applied by now. :-)
That would work, except that once recorder #1 has been confiscated (and the cop fails to ask you if you have a recorder #2) he will rightly assume that your conversation is now private. Since you're the only one who knows that you're still making a "secret recording," you're back to square one--legally.
I wouldn't consider a softdrink that [allegedly] causes 3 deaths in 10,000,000 (or whatever) defrauding the public. I would call the drink a success, and I would call the three people who may have died from rare over-consumption complications, unfortunate Darwin Award recipients (cruel and insensitive? maybe. realistic? yes).
People aren't dropping dead left and right, and still, someone might be compelled to check into it (Consumer Reports), but as long as it poses no more risk than the odds of a shark attack, then leave it the fuck alone.
The Safety Nazi's(tm) are sterilizing the fun in life by trying to remove all risk for ALL people. Fuck 'em.
I suppose the water stream would still technically be a projectile though...and the producers probably wouldn't be too happy with Mike Tyson KO's.